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Opinion:when it comes to headline-grabbing proposals,Bjarke Ingels and BIG are becoming increasingly hard to beat – and increasingly divisive among critics. Aaron Betsky explains why he's part of the BIG fan club.

Nobody plays with form as well as Bjarke Ingels. It is the reason why he is the architect my students love more than any other designer working today – one handed in as her final paper an essay entitled How Bjarke Ingels Will Save the World (of Architecture).

The success of his work comes from a combination of a deft manipulation of a limited set of materials and forms, and a conceptual commitment to his twin goals of making science fiction (or video games) real and saving the planet.

I am not saying that Ingels is the world's best architect

I am not saying that Ingels is the world's best architect. It's just that nobody other than this relatively young designer and his team, the chutzpah-named BIG, make forms that reverberate as successfully in a culture that is addicted to images manipulated to have instant and high impact.

I am a sceptic. I still believe that architecture should be doing something else these days – namely concentrating on the reuse and re-imagination of the landscapes and resources we already have. But, when I see Ingels' apartment tower rising up on the edge of Manhattan, its pinnacle rising to meet the spires in the island's heart while its volume spreads out in a single flow towards the waterfront, its singularity cut by the courtyard that reveals the brittle array of apartments turning towards the views, I am in awe.

What is remarkable is how often Ingels manages to astonish with what seem like simple gestures that are both appropriate and bold in their effect. In Kuala Lumpur he proposed turning a skyscraper upside down to make the floors with the views the largest ones. In Park City, Utah, he mimicked and twisted an old mine building and proposed building it out of stacked logs.

His Lego Museum is a stack of supersized blocks that some child giant might have left behind after it emptied his box of toys. His contribution to Ground Zero, a tower that uses the need for large studio floors in its lower section to cantilever out and dissolve the thrust of its mass into a piling up of New York's lower blocks, is the first building that seems right for this myth-enshrouded site.

What sets Ingels apart is his ability to use the right move at the right time in the right place

The moves the architect uses are, on the whole, fairly limited, and certainly not all original.

There is the free stacking, which OMA started and MVRDV and others continued. There is the Moebius strip, which first showed up in the work of UNStudio. There is the twisted tower, which many people have tried to build. And there is the spread or smooch, the figure-of-eight, the squished oval with lifted sides, and the underground building peeking up with tilted corners or a bulging middle.

It is no more or less a restricted form language than most good architects use. What sets Ingels apart is his ability to use the right move at the right time and in the right place.

The buried building is absolutely the right thing to do in front of the Smithsonian's Castle on the National Mall, as it is for the Maritime Museum next to "Hamlet's Castle" in Denmark. The spread works as well in Tianjin as it does in Manhattan, although for different reasons (it assimilates a shopping mall into the tower and continues the landscape up its base, thus melding the singular object with its surroundings). The ovoid looks to be as good for a museum in Greenland as it does for the centre of the Givskud Zoo, also in Denmark.

This architect cares seriously about the environment. His parks and his buildings both respond to climate in a thoughtful manner. It is no coincidence that he organised the book from hot to cold climate sites, coding the pages' borders with colours to indicate their location.

Much of Hot to Cold is fiction. Many of the most dramatic buildings are just proposals, although a remarkable percentage of them are under construction. For an office that has been around for only a decade or so, BIG has been remarkably productive, and is building in many different parts of the world.

This is a tribute to the technologies that tie us all together and let an architect compete globally if he is willing to rack up the air miles (and not worry too much about his carbon footprint). It is also a tribute to Ingels' ability to understand how to make icons that a client or selection committee can understand immediately and that the construction industry, powered as it is today by computer-aided methods, can turn out with equal ease.

Ingels' work is also a fiction in the sense that he sees it as a fictional version of the world that exists, a kind of built science fiction. His inspiration is comic books (previous monographs of the firm have taken that form) and writers such as William Gibson, the inventor of cyberpunk, and Douglas Coupland, rather than the monuments of architectural history.

All of this also begs the question of who is actually making this architecture

This is architecture lite, architecture as a rewriting of the script of our modern world, architecture skating, surfing, and doing parcours up and down the modern city and suburb.

All of that means that Ingels has also found a new way to embody the master builder. No Howard Roark he, but also no Frank Gehry or Norman Foster. His mastery has more to do with flips and tricks than with structure and the magnificent play of forms in light. This is not monument making, but a perhaps temporary re-imagination of our scenes into wildly expressive intersections of form.

Of course, all of this also begs the question of who is actually making this architecture. In many ways BIG is the most skillful inheritor of the OMA/AMO model, a collective of concept-based manipulators of form with a pop figure icon as its public face.

However the work appears, it winds up having a backbeat you can't lose and an awesome super quality that is just, well, so hot and so cool. Bring it on, Bjarke, there is a serious world there with serious problem that could use some playful form.

Aaron Betsky is dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including a forthcoming survey of Modernism in architecture and design. He writes a twice-weekly blog for architectmagazine.com, Beyond Buildings.

Comments

I think the time has come to surrender. The time has come to let go of the traditional idea of architecture. Let's wave our goodbyes to the negative and unexcited “grand masters” of our time.

I sincerely imagine a hot and cool future ahead, inspired by comic books and upside-down skyscrapers. A future where we tell the laypeople, that out buildings are inspired by galaxies and popsicles, leaving all the BIG-lievers amazed and tremendously happy, screaming "Yes is more!". The great future of architecture should be concerned about twists, flips and tricks. Come on, think BIG. YES IS MORE!

s_p

What we see here with BIG are not just revelations in architecture, but in how architecture presents itself. There is almost a weekly outpouring images of proposals from the office on this and other websites, not to mention announcements of forthcoming projects, publications, public events, as well as Bjarke lectures and appearances.

BIG has obtained a mastery over media optics. And has a consistency that extends across all of the office's efforts. For architects, there is more to learn here from BIG than just having the right form at the right place in the right time; but a masterclass in PR and a lesson on how architecture can become relevant again in the public sphere.

just a guest

It's all in the title: "PLAYS".

Simil

I get the impression that Dezeen does not like Bjake Ingels and wants people to comment badly on him.

Soupdragon

As Mies famously said: "I'd rather be good than interesting".

Davide

Good point.

Le Corbusier

Great article.

The profession needs architects like BIG to question the status quo and help progress/question/reimagine the canon of architecture. Excited to see the their Serpentine this year – hopefully it won't be stuck together with sellotape like last year.

spartanladkenny

The profession needs architects to question the status quo? So BIG is the Donald Trump of architecture?

BIG Farce

BIG is a charlatan.

HeywoodFloyd

Design has been replaced by narrative, process has been replaced by presentation, and architecture has been replaced by public relations.

A minority of masochists keep holding out for the lighting to dramatically change and reveal to everyone the emperor's lack of clothing that is already so agonisingly apparent to some of us, but in the information age it will always be more important to be interesting than to be good.

Harris Jay

Also, we seem to be losing the notion of a counter-culture.

Børge M

Just great! Fantastic summary. Thank you. An enormous change in the profession is underway. Architects need to be much better to serve their proposals for the public and the developer in an appealing way. Simple communication and a focus on public relations are and will be core essentials for the architect.

Design is, from this day on, dead. Unless architects take the sole responsibility, for the creation and explanation of our common great future surroundings.

HeywoodFloyd

Yes an enormous change is underway - for the worse. The simple communication that you are so excited about is actually dumbed down populist design rhetoric intended to retroactively rationalize whatever geometric didacticism Bjarke is trying to ram down our throats this week.

In celebrating the death of design you sound exactly like the television executives of the 50s celebrating the end of cinema and the dot com boomers of the 90s prophesizing the end of the novel.

Once we plow through this initial wave of digital tyrannization that is currently rotting our profession - and I do have confidence that we will eventually plow through it - my hope is that we will be able to look back on Bjarke and the rest of his ilk and see them for what they really are.

ivan.capitani

Well said!

Børge M

Many years of architectural education makes the architect see "things" in architecture, which laypeople don't. Seduced by these fascinating narratives, many people don’t see why these designs are bad; instead they see them as fascinating, because they somehow and for once understand architecture and the value BIG adds by means of architecture.

And let’s face it; the architect has absolutely no influence on the decision whether or not to build. We need to convince ordinary people by a simple communication, which of course shouldn’t impact our architectural product retroactively. Would you tell a child how a nuclear plant works by means of advanced mathematical equations?

The success of Bjarke Ingels’ office is undeniable, and just sitting hoping for a better future is foolish. Other offices need to win those competitions and contracts.

I believe that the profession needs to plough through this superficial approach before it’s too late, by somehow proving the increased value of another kind of architecture.

Hopefully before a BIG kind of architecture occupies every single plot in the world. If the BIG way becomes the main way of architecture, I really believe design is somehow dead. And of course, I’m sorry if I’m sounding like a television executive of the 50s.

spadestick

The Dr Oz. of architecture - the other doctors don't think very highly of this guy.

H-J

You have to give the guy credit that he gets things done where everybody else seems to fail. His built diagrams work rather well as urban objects I think, only the materialisation up close is often problematic, but that's more of a budget thing caused by the client's wallet I suppose.

He's in general able to keep innovative/playful elements in his designs even with the dullest corporate clients where other architects are not inventive enough to keep those key elements in the project and have to dull down their designs beyond recognition.

His attention to the connection between public (pedestrian) space and the built (private) object is commendable, in my opinion he's a social-democratic architect able to work with(in) a hyper-capitalist society, using the mechanisms of capitalism to push his social and environmental agenda.

agagnu

BIG is big putting architectonics back to the craze of forms on canvas and blown up sculptures.

BIG, like Zaha, seems to lack initial technical support and implementation while Gehry is still picking scraps from the waste bin for inspiration.

BIG has to slow down for a proven portfolio to sustain his career. Nobody can afford risking lawsuits over defects and failed programmes as he hops across the globe. I wish him well.

Leandro Llorente

Anyone actually visited the spaces he makes? I want to know how the architectural manipulations actually influence the spaces.